US Army General Martin Dempsey delivered an April 2012 speech at Harvard University where he addressed what he calls the "security paradox," where he stated, "although geopolitical trends are ushering in greater levels of peace and stability worldwide, destructive technologies are available to a wider and more disparate pool of adversaries."

Dempsey related his greatest fear - that these technologies were proliferating "horizontally across advanced militaries in the world," and "vertically, down to nonstate actors, especially insurgents, terrorist groups and even transnational organized crime."

While in many ways such concerns are sensible, and any responsible military charged with the defense of a nation would consider and prepare for not only new technologies but adapting appropriately to socioeconomic paradigm shifts, they hardly constitute the greatest threat America faces protecting its borders. The real threat General Dempsey and the Joint Chiefs of Staff fear is the shifting balance of power and the reduction of the vast disparity that once allowed the United States and the West in general to pursue its goals beyond its borders with impunity.

Dempsey notes in his speech that nuclear weapons were a "game-changing capability that was in the hands of the United States initially." Of course, students of history remember exactly what the US did with these weapons when the balance of power was so radically tipped in its favor - bomb Japan with atomic bombs ... twice.

Dempsey continues by stating that although the Russians and others began acquiring the weapons "membership was limited by the high cost of entry."

Image: This is what happens when the balance of power tips too far in favor of any particular party. Further use of nuclear weapons on civilian populations was curtailed not because of the West's humanitarian disposition, but because of proliferation and the danger of incurring a retaliatory attack. Even today, the prevention of states like Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons revolves around depriving them of a formidable defensive deterrence, not around any fear of an Iranian "first strike."

What he fears now is that technology is advancing so quickly and that the "high cost of entry" for effective weapon systems and other forms of military technology are being lowered so significantly that even individuals may pose a significant threat of being able to "coerce" the United States. Dempsey suggests that the military be reformed to face every threat from individuals up to nation-states and everything in between, and specifically mentions "cyber and special operations forces."

Dempsey admits subtly throughout his speech that American defense goes well beyond protecting borders, and instead focuses primarily on protecting America's "interests." This includes focusing on entire regions of the world well-beyond America's borders including Asia. It is exactly Dempsey's veiled sales pitch for neo-imperialism maintained through a military reconfigured to fight 4th generation warfare against other nations that reveals the true nature of his concerns regarding technology.

The True Fear of Oligarchs

America will always be able to obtain or produce the latest military weapon systems, devise the most advanced defenses, and maintain the ultimate deterrent against unprovoked attacks. America's only threat is what stands against its ability to meddle at will around the globe, projecting its power beyond its borders on behalf of the corporate-financier oligarchs that direct Western policy. Losing this ability threatens the parasitic monopoly-based economic system of the West and the power base of the corporate-financier oligarchs that depends on it.

Indeed, the threat technology poses to the elite goes beyond military hardware. It includes anything that challenges the West's monopoly over power, finances, resources, manufacturing, distribution, media, and health. While the Pentagon is planning global hit squads and cyber brigades, the global oligarchs are resorting to draconian legislation such as SOPA, ACTA, OPEN and CISPA, using legal concepts such as "intellectual property" and "infrastructure protection" to maintain its monopoly by controlling the very ideas from which all innovation and progress stem from. This includes everything from media to medicine, genetic codes, and technical processes. What can't be curtailed using the excuse of "intellectual property," will be done through regulation regarding "environmentalism," "health," and "safety."

True technical progress is being made at a break-neck pace - and just like Dempsey points out in regards to weapons, this technology is propagating both horizontally and vertically in ways never before imagined. What once required an army of workers, a capital intensive printing press, and a large physical distribution network fifty years ago can now be done by a single individual using a blog for the cost of an Internet connection, and on a scale even larger than the most prolific press barons of yesteryear.

Already product designs reside on large online libraries (Thingiverse for example) that users with 3D printers, either home-made or commercially built, can print at will. A design made in California can be printed out by a user in Hong Kong - no shipping necessary. The designs are put online for free, and can be downloaded and printed for free - minus the cost of the plastic used to make it. And already the corporate-financier oligarchs see their empires built upon cheap trinkets shipped in from China crumbling and are already preparing an "intellectual property" war to combat it.

Printers that can output DNA, coded using software are already a reality - however impractical. In the future everything from gene-therapies and medicines, to tissue and replacement body parts will be in the reach of an ever-expanding number of medical practitioners and hobbyists. Synthetic lifeforms and engineered bacteria will be able to output materials for energy production and construction - this coupled with personal manufacturing will make the lengthy centralized supply chains of today's Fortune 500 corporations obsolete.

The same nightmare that wakes up General Dempsey in the middle of the night - one involving a world that he no longer operates in with impunity - is a nightmare shared by all oligarchs throughout all of human history. From the "Old Oligarch's" fear of the upward social mobility advances in naval technology afforded Greeks in the 300 B.C. "Athenian Constitution," to the feudal lords during the advent of the printing press, to bankers, industrialists, and generals today, technological progress putting power into the hands of people they presume dominion over spells the end of their existence as they know it.

While Dempsey attempts to sound sensible in public by suggesting the threat comes from terrorists and rogue states, in reality he represents a system that has long-since blurred the lines between militants with new weapon systems and regular people developing and deploying "disruptive technology." It also includes anyone threatening the current monetary paradigm, so much so that a man selling silver coins was labeled a "terrorist" by the FBI.

Which Path We Take is Up to Us

Technological progress will proceed, if the corporate-financier oligarchy has its way, at a pace they can control and monopolize. And for the first time in human history, predictions of a Malthusian catastrophe genuinely loom over us, not because of limitations on growth, but because of the global elite impeding progress for the preservation of their wealth and power - impeding the very progress needed for our continued safety, well-being, prosperity, and peace.

Technological progress will proceed, if we the people have our way, from the grassroots up, learning, understanding and spreading awareness of human ingenuity, the latest advancements, and how best to leverage them for the benefit of all mankind. We must have the resolve to develop and support local industry while cutting off the monopolists who have procured so much unwarranted power and influence through our own complicity in the first place. The current powers-that-be fear progress and will ensure disruptive technology never reaches our hands, even if it means economic and societal collapse. Conversely, then, we must make sure ourselves that it does reach our hands.

Remember also the lessons taught to the world at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about what a superpower does when it has uncontested dominion over any given technology - it uses it with impunity and at will. The proliferation of powerful technology suits human nature - the fear of retribution by others who possess it puts self-governance on the use of such technology against others. The invisible hand of self-interest (and self-preservation) has proven more reliable when odds are even than any amount of governance, rules, or regulation.

18 comments:

One of (if not) the greatest threat to the elite is their monopoly on energy. Free energy technology is greatly suppressed (anyone remember Stanley Myers?).

Energy controls food, transportation, commerce, etc. Control the energy, and you control what it in turn controls.

Millions of people have died and are dying for lack of energy to desalinate and clean water, grow their own food, and heat their homes in the winter. Far too many elderly have had to choose between heat or medicine or food. Suppression of free energy by the elite should be remembered as one of the biggest crimes against humanity in modern times.

Hopefully soon, we can rid ourselves of this oppression and evolve past the controls of the elites.

When people find out what has been kept from them, they will go berserk.Better times are coming, it will take a little while to get things going; but without the strangulation of the Elite, things should be far far easier.What we will have to face though, before that happens, is deeply worrying and we will have to cling to the dream for strength, and make it reality.

Nope, you have it completely wrong regarding nuclear weapons. Perceived equality of forces on hair trigger (like WWI) is what causes uncontrolled devastating conflict. Proliferation & multipolar complexing is an accident or misjudgement waiting to happen and will end the world as we know it in time. The failure of nerve (rationalized by pie in the sky one-worldism) by which America allowed 1st Russia and then China to obtain the A bomb and H bomb set the stage and will eventually have fatal consequences for the planet. The The failure of Russia and China, in their quest to play short-term geopolitics vs the US, to join in efforts to stop proliferation is accelerating the process. Only the demonstrated will of a nuclear "club" to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively can stop proliferation.

"Free energy" is a nonsense concept that shifts attention from deregulating the known energy technologies that are being throttled by legislation with the covert purpose of keeping the price up. All energy is "free" once you have the technology to liberate and harness it. . . liberating and harnessing the energy always has an COST. For instance, geothermal energy is "free" once you have all the equipment in place to utilize it.

Tony Cartalucci is one of the best commentator and analyst, but even him as you all, you all forget de one million way that the PTB could oblige us to be 100% submissive. Look at the total control of individual financial transactions . They will tax us at large and to their whishes. They are doing now, the absolute obscene plundering ( see Bastiat)they will do at any time. How could we deal with this perfect apparatus of the Power that Be. We are living in a dream and we are Utopian dreaming, they are perfect pragmatic Dystopian . They have not any kind of fear. What they have done until now all 3000 years long they will do again and again. This is the absolutely socio- pathology of the Power, but they are consequent and they corrupt us more then we can imagine ! It is no chance in the Power that Be's Hell for us !

Yeah, y'all keep up the mental masturbation by telling yourselves that the elites are scared. When was the last time you saw or heard of one of them shaking with fear? Riiiiiiiiight! Whatever it takes to keep up the delusions.

The news about ColdFusion/LENR energy reactors (release of energy bound up in Hydrogen and metals) is very encouraging. Perhaps we will see some home and industrial reactors in the marketplace at the end of this year!jdh

Technology and our unblinking obedience to the myth of progress, is largely responsible for the present sense of crisis on Earth - - so I doubt that more technology will provide a solution.

The foundation, the fundamental philosophical basis, of science, engineering and modern technology is the reduction of the human to that of a beast, a beast with no feelings and no soul. A cybernetic machine, a cyborg. Forward thinkers are urgently needed to rediscover and reaffirm the human and the human scale, to begin the process of rejecting modern technology - not suckle at its teat.

"Sustainable" is incompatible with capitalism and globalization.

After the War of the League of Cambrai, the Black Guelph Giovanni faction took control of Venetian interests and under Paolo Sarpi, through his Projects Galileo, Descartes and Bacon, laid the foundation for reductionist Empiricism. The idea: Since the human does not have a divine soul and is only a beast, since numbers have (Kabbalistc) powers and allow us to measure reality itself and plot it onto paper, since we can reduce a whole to its parts, since our world can be described like a clockwork, then the human is but a cog in the machine.

The origins of modern "science" in the occult world of Kabbalah and Hermeticism, through the Rosicrucians and Freemasons, to the Royal Society has been traced with impeccable detail by two great antagonists, the Warburg Institute and the Schiller Institute. That the Venetian project has been a total success is evident as today most people work and pray for "Money", worship "Science", and accept the blessings of "Progress". For the 1%, the Technopia of the Transhumans promises Human 2.0 and desktop nano-assemblers, before they disappear into the Singularity.

..2.. Technology has a physical component producing things we can see - a coin, a telescope, a train, a landmine. But it also has an invisible, non-physical component, that affects our thinking - language, the alphabet, mathematics, money, hypnosis. Do you give a man a fishing rod, or teach him how to fish?

Lewis Mumford calls this bigger entity of the physical technology, plus all the other things that are needed to support it, the Megamachine. The Megamachine is always been under the control of the elite. The pharaohic megamachine built the pyramids, the Church megamachine built the medieval cathedrals, the Venetian megamachine built the banks and stock exchanges, the Military-Industrial megamachine built the internet.

Technology is embedded in, and used to extend, systems of control. The early printing presses, the material printed, the language used, were controlled by the elite. The megamachine immedieately exerted absolute control over the books, the ideas expressed, the words themselves. Early project Chaucer, and later projects Shakespeare and RSV Bible usurped the English language, providing the great unwashed with most of the very words we still need and use.

The vast majority of people, the peasants, the common folk, were illiterate. Today, 500 years after the printing press was introduced, a significant percentage of people are still in poverty and can not read or write. Huge numbers of people, in rural areas and city slums, live today in conditions no better then Medieval peasants. We have the technology to deliver a cruise missile with pin point precision but we seem incapable of providing mosquito nets to not-so-remote villages. Meanwhile, the ever present TV lobotomizes generation after generation, and presents a carefully choreographed picture that technology is just wonderful, liberating. The children meanwhile undergo public schooling, whose sole purpose is to produce obedient workers, cogs for the megamachine. ..cont3.

..3..When Xerox released the Xeroxing machine it made cheap photo-copying possible. Then there was giddy talk of a revolution in printing, a flood of new ideas, a leveling of the playing field. But today we see the control of global media is tighter, has been concentrated even more. When handing out anti-globalization fliers, so diligently Xeroxed, you will likely get a thump on the head to remind you who is still in control.

And the flipside? Xeroxing is now considered out-dated, all that Xeroxing is wasting paper, don't you know. Use Facebook instead.

It is not about who controls the technology, but who controls the thinking.

If you believe that technology has been a wonderful tool for human betterment, that technological solutions are the only solutions, and that technology is the driver of human betterment, travel more, visit the "Third World". A smart phone, a microwave, a LCD TV, a flashy car, a front lawn, these may seem like the pinnacle of civilization, but do not let that fool you that this is a standard everyone should aspire too. As Bob Marley interjected when asked about using the fruits of Babylon to .... "The fruits of Babylon? Babylon has no fruits".

The elite have no fear of this or that technology since they control, and have always controlled, all parts of the Megamachine that need controlling.

The only thing the elite truly fear (since Nicolas of Cusa and the Doctrine of Learned Ignorance) is an un-brainwashed human, a free thinking, creative individual.

The NASA megamachine spent millions of dollars developing a ball-point pen that could write in zero-gravity. Why didn't they use a pencil?

Shokdee - you bring up great points - however you conclude that the elite truly fear an "un-brainwashed human, a free thinking, creative individual," and while I completely agree with you - what exactly do you think such a creative individual will create? Technology of course.

I don't think anyone is saying technology in and of itself will solve all problems, in fact it seems that they are saying exactly what you are saying - intelligent, free people need to be the ones that wield it - then and only then will things change for the better.

If the Elites go public with their fear, it would verify this article and they would lose their sovereignty in an instant. So tell me, do you really think they would even consider the thought of the notion of putting effort into publicizing their fear through mainstream media

9/11 Questions

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